Workers at Indian plant probed on radioactive leak

BANGALORE, India (Reuters) - Investigators into the leak of a radioactive substance into drinking water at an Indian atomic plant have questioned several employees, officials said on Monday. The government has said the contamination was deliberate.

With the help of Indian intelligence, the government-run Nuclear Power Corporation has launched a probe on how tritium seeped into a water cooler, which put 55 workers into medical care for excessive exposure to radiation.

The leak may raise security fears over India's nuclear energy program, though both the government and the director of the plant have played down the threat of the leak to the public.

"Investigations are being carried out to find out how it happened and who did it," a plant official, who did not want to be identified, told Reuters.

The plant is in Kaiga on the west coast, 450 km (280 miles) from Bangalore. The contamination was deliberate, several newspapers on Monday quoted the government and the head of India's Atomic Energy Commission as saying.

"On the face of it, the incident appears to be the handiwork of a disgruntled employee," Science Minister Prithviraj Chavan said, according to the Asian Age.

India signed a landmark civilian nuclear deal with the United States in 2008 to help meet the growing energy needs of the world's second most populous nation.

The pact brought India out of decades of nuclear isolation after it developed atomic bombs. India also reached a nuclear pact over the weekend with Canada [nN28397479], which had designed the reactors used by India to produce a bomb in 1974.

(Reporting by Habib Beary; writing by Matthias Williams; Editing by Ron Popeski)